US actress Anne Heche, the Emmy-winning film and television star whose dramatic Hollywood rise in the 1990s and accomplished career contrasted with personal chapters of turmoil, has died of injuries suffered in a fiery car crash in Los Angeles last week.
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She was 53.
Spokeswoman Holly Baird on Sunday said Heche "been peacefully taken off life support."
Heche had been on life support at a Los Angeles burn centre after suffering a severe brain injury when her car crashed into a home August 5, according to a statement released on Thursday by a representative on behalf of her family and friends.
She had not been expected to survive the crash, in which her car was embedded in the house as flames erupted.
She was declared brain dead on Friday, but had remained on life support for possible organ donation. Her heart stopped Sunday.
Heche played opposite Harrison Ford, Johnny Deep and other stars during a steady screen career that contrasted with personal chapters of turmoil.
An Ohio native, Heche first came to prominence on the soap opera Another World from 1987 to 1991. She won a Daytime Emmy Award for the role.
In the late 1990s she became one of the hottest stars in Hollywood, a constant on magazine covers and in big-budget films.
In 1997 alone, she co-starred with Depp in Donnie Brasco and with Ford in Six Days, Seven Nights.
Around the same time, her personal life led to even greater fame, and both personal and professional upheaval.
She met talk show host Ellen DeGeneres at a the 1997 Vanity Fair Oscar party and they began a three-year relationship that made one of Hollywood's first openly gay couples.
But Heche later said her career was damaged by an industry wary of casting her in leading roles. She would remember advisers opposing her decision to have DeGeneres accompany her to the premiere of Volcano.
After she and DeGeneres parted, Heche had a public breakdown and would speak candidly of her mental health struggles.
In 2000, soon after her break-up with DeGeneres, Heche was hospitalised after knocking on the door of a stranger in a rural area near Fresno, California. Authorities said she had appeared shaken and disoriented and spoke incoherently.
She later had a son with camera operator Coleman Laffoon, to whom she was married from 2001 to 2009. She had another son during a relationship with actor James Tupper, her co-star on the TV series Men In Trees.
Australian Associated Press
